Omega Point

Catherine Grows as a Person

Since attend­ing Media that Mat­ters 2009 at Hol­ly­hock this May, I’ve been feel­ing very introspective.

To say I was skep­ti­cal of some aspects of the con­fer­ence before­hand would be a ter­ri­ble, ter­ri­ble under­state­ment. On the ride up with for­mer coworker Jnet:
Her: “So are you recov­ered from your flu?” [Swine flu, I swear.]
Me: “I guess, yeah… I’m still not very hun­gry.“
Her: “Well, you’ll have lots of good veg­e­tar­ian cook­ing at Cortes.“
Me: “…Whaaah? Awwww.”

I know! For­tu­nately, said veg­e­tar­ian cook­ing turned out to be deli­cious and, con­trary to our hosts’ warn­ing, I didn’t totally fart the entire time. Upon leav­ing Cortes, Jnet and I imme­di­ately went to a Wendy’s in Camp­bell River, but that’s nei­ther here nor there. It was good, trust me.

Now, I’m not a super-huggy per­son, and there was a bit more hug­ging than I’m used to, which is hon­estly say­ing a lot, com­ing from the Van­cou­ver social media scene. There was also a sub­stan­tially greater-than-usual amount of talk­ing about ambi­tions and goals and feel­ings and things. On the other hand, there were parts I was really inter­ested in, such as answer­ing the ques­tion, “is it pos­si­ble to cre­ate a new medium and use it for artis­tic pur­poses with­out the first few years of its exis­tence being used expressly to dis­cuss that medium?” (See pho­tog­ra­phy, cave paint­ing, the web, Twit­ter, etc.) The answer: maybe?

Despite my skep­ti­cism, it turned out that there were parts that proved extremely valu­able to me. Incred­i­bly, these were the parts that involved tack­ling issues and feel­ings! And talk­ing about them! If the words “coach­ing cir­cle” make you wrin­kle your nose in pain, you’re expe­ri­enc­ing more or less the same sort of antic­i­pa­tion as I was beforehand.

And yet, the coach­ing cir­cle was extremely help­ful after all. Of course, there were still parts of Media that Mat­ters that I was per­haps a lit­tle too much of a cyn­i­cal prude to enjoy.

So I got back and decided I needed to make some changes. So I’m try­ing new things this sum­mer. First of all, as men­tioned in my last post, my knees have finally recov­ered enough for me to get places with my exer­cise reg­i­men. (I think my prob­lem with the sta­tion­ary bike is that I get bored and always have a sneak­ing sus­pi­cion that I’m accom­plish­ing less than I ought to be. I might end up buy­ing a trainer for my bike, since there’s plenty on Craigslist, but actu­ally using it with­out feel­ing like I’m just screw­ing around, that will be the challenge.)

So, exer­cise. What else?

• Writ­ing more. Theoretically.
• Actu­ally build­ing a bicy­cle instead of just buy­ing one.
• Knit­ting classes at Three Bags Full on Main Street. I’ve never knit before.
• Going to more art shows. More bar­be­ques. More events.
• Quit­ting my job and going to art school.

Oh yeah. That last one. I’m enter­ing Lan­gara College’s Fine Arts pro­gram in Sep­tem­ber, then trans­fer­ring to Emily Carr to fin­ish up my under­grad. So that’s new too.